In Other Words: Destination Imagination

Crew of the Frank A. Jagger loads their boat full of lumber at the Albany Lumber District in the 1870s.

By Akum Norder/518Life

If your discount furniture needs have ever taken you into North Albany, you may have noticed a section of old wall alongside the road near retailer Huck Finn’s Warehouse. Those blocks of stone are one of the few remnants of the area’s past. That road you’re on? It’s Erie Boulevard. It traces the path of the Erie Canal. You’re standing in what was once the Lumber District, the heart of industrial Albany.

Albany was once one of the largest lumber markets in the United States, thanks to the Erie Canal; for two and a half decades in the 19th century, Albany was the country’s most important wholesale source of white pine. A bicentennial history of Albany noted that even in 1886, with the glory days past, there was “no branch of business in this city of more extensive proportions” than the lumber industry. They went on:

“While the receipts of lumber are greater at Chicago, the Albany market is none the less important. … All the foreign shipments are negotiated from this point. The lumber for South America, the West Indies and other foreign countries is assorted here, and much of it is manufactured here into doors, ceilings, etc., so as to be ready for use when reaching destination. The trade with Australia is very extensive, millions of feet of prepared lumber being sent to that continent from here every season.”

The Lumber District was in a patch of land between the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. City maps from the 19th century show dozens of long slips jutting off the canal like the teeth of a comb; from these, boats could unload right into the lumber yards. The district handled hundreds of millions of board feet per year. An 1898 labor union publication sang its praises:

“The conveniences for doing business in the lumber district of Albany are unrivaled. A street railway runs to and through it; telegraph and telephone lines afford immediate communication, large planing mills are ready to quickly dress lumber in every way and to any amount, and good clean dining halls await the wants of customers.”

Albany got its timber from the north woods and, via the canal system, from western New York and Canada. It seemed, for a few lifetimes at least, that the trees would never run out.

But they did, of course. As local mills had to seek timber farther and farther afield, it made less and less sense to ship it to Albany. Before the 20th century was a decade old, the Lumber District was sputtering; costs skyrocketed and some yards suffered fires. In 1921, the Albany Evening Journal urged the city to fill in the slips and the “obsolete” Erie Canal and use the land for a new industrial center. Ten years after, the Lumber District was Jungletown, a Depression-era camp of the homeless and the desperate, near the dump.

The Lumber District was something that defined Albany. Today hardly anyone even remembers it was ever there.

Something else has recently put this section of Albany back on the map: The owners of Huck Finn’s Warehouse have been working with the county on plans to bring the rides from Hoffman’s Playland there. Nearly everyone in the Capital Region knows the beloved Colonie amusement park, which delighted both kids and parents from 1952 until its closing in 2014. Hoffman’s was merrily un-modern: the carrousel, the Ferris wheel, the sparkly cars that went round and round on their little track. Plenty of us found it pleasant to remember that we don’t have to experience G-forces to have a good time.

The rides of the former Hoffman’s Playland might end up taking a ride themselves.

If Erie Boulevard succeeds in going from somewhere, to nowhere, to somewhere again, it’s an evolution that reflects the 21st-century economy: Nowadays, when a city looks for something to define — or at least sustain — itself, it often talks in terms of becoming a destination. We look to tourism: something to bring in people and money. A convention center. An aquarium. Maybe we could even build on our history to become a hub for heritage tourism.

It’s a transformation that can seem impossible. But that’s what’s so compelling about the Lumber District story: Albany has already been transformed, many times over. Of course we can become a different kind of city; in fact, it’s inevitable. That’s one of the gifts that history gives us: the long view.

A little amusement park won’t reinvent Albany, not by a long shot. But it’s a step in the right direction. And it’s a step that shows the ability to reimagine ourselves.